(a) Field
The present invention relates to a printer, a printing system, and a print control method, particularly being useful in a printer and a printing system capable of receiving an input of printing data containing a character code of a character from a host computer to execute printing of a string on the basis of the input character code.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A printing system comprising a printer connected to a host computer is well known wherein the printer executes printing upon receipt of printing data of a document and others produced by the host computer. Printing is executed on the basis of a character code of a character and a font designated by the host computer.
Trends toward the globalization of industry have had more computers capable of handling a mix of characters of a plurality of languages. A smart phone, a tablet, and other mobiles have been used worldwide without limitation of a country. Most of such computers and mobiles have been using Unicode, a computing industry standard for the consistent representation of text. Unicode has been the major standard especially for mobiles. Unicode contains more than million code points covering worldwide languages.
Most conventional printers, however, have been using a code page, a standard specific to a particular country or region. Such printers does not have a font set covering the entire set of code points of Unicode. Any document produced by the host computer using Unicode possibly contains a character code or a font beyond the coverage of the printer, resulting in generation of garbled characters in a printed document.
A solution has been proposed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2013-210885 ([0073] and FIG. 11) where a print control apparatus is provided between the host computer and the printer to convert a universal character code such as Unicode sent from the host computer into a specific character code for the printer (a character code covering font data installed in the printer). A print instruction comprises a “character code switching command” followed by a specific character code. The character code switching command switches the character codes according to language attributes.
Another solution has been proposed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-91419 where a printer is provided with a plurality of font sets covering JIS code, Unicode, or Windows (registered trademark) compatible Glyph-Width for every character code so that a desired font set is selectable according to printing environment. The character codes are switchable by selecting a font set via a command, allowing easy printing with JIS code, Unicode, or Glyph-Width only by programming the printer driver.